Yank wader eventually nailed

After a good deal of searching and various false starts and mini-dips, I got a message from Nick to say that he’d re-found the elusive American wader on the local mudflats. I was there within minutes and quickly picked out the bird amongst European Golden Plovers. It was of course an American Golden Plover, my second at this location. Fitting my rarely used 2x converter, I did manage some respectable images; I like the panoramic one best, but the ‘wings raised’ image shows the distinctive pale grey underwing. About an hour after I’d got my best images, the whole flock took off, spent ages swirling around high above me only to then head off to nowhere in particular never to be seen again. On the 2nd November, I relocated it twice. It was on the second occasion that I managed to close in on the bird and get some much more satisfactory images, partly because the flock had settled on a raised sandbar enabling me to create a decent bokeh in front of and behind the bird. Annoyingly, when the flock took flight about 10 minutes later, that was the last I saw of the bird, despite an extensive search – lasting the best part of about three hours! Still, despite the extensive cropping, I enjoyed looking back through the images: it really is a very distinctive bird when you get a good view, clearly very different from its commoner relatives: quite apart from the blotchy underparts (against a whitish background) and the ‘black and white face’, the upperparts are also much colder in tone, and the bird is clearly a fair bit smaller and daintier too. Very smart.